Speaker 1: It was the only elevator in the bell Bent building
Speaker 1: with real brass on the panel, A button's dell to
Speaker 1: petal pill gold by decades of cleaning. I ran my
Speaker 1: thumb over seven, the last four in this old lady's
Speaker 1: official repertoire, then counted up from lobby, as I always did,
Speaker 1: half by habit, half in boredom. One two, three, four, five, six, seven,
Speaker 1: seven stories seven chances a night sawtle and insalmniact manager
Speaker 1: or glance into city dock through a blank window. But Tuesday,
Speaker 1: just after midnight, newly assigned to the supper section, the
Speaker 1: panel was wrong. The numbery was there, Nothing fancy, no
Speaker 1: glowing symbol or cane frontage, just a plane that mate
Speaker 1: button by the door. Even the size felt right, as
Speaker 1: if my thumb had always laid up at fob, but
Speaker 1: only now bothered to notice. I blinked and peeved closer.
Speaker 1: I checked for a sticker or overlay, even felt the
Speaker 1: edges with my thumbnail. The seven buttons were still patented
Speaker 1: with the regular sleepy scratches of a century old vertical commute.
Speaker 1: Eight matched perfectly, where as if it belonged but I'd
Speaker 1: pulled late clean in this elevator every week for two years.
Speaker 1: You develop a memory for this sort of thing, the
Speaker 1: way the doors always wheeze. Afore the silence of O seven,
Speaker 1: I pressed the new button. The rear lay inside, thunk
Speaker 1: deep in the shaft, and the carriage rose, smooth and
Speaker 1: punctual as ever, no lurch, no showy trammer. The panel
Speaker 1: lamps twinkled up six, then seven, a beat longer between
Speaker 1: seven and which surely couldn't exist above it. My reflection
Speaker 1: had gone fishing in the mirrored wall, the hum of
Speaker 1: the cables tightening against some unseen ingredient floor. Its lamp
Speaker 1: glowed a demure yellow. The doors opened brass again, but
Speaker 1: knew here gleaming without the fine grid in every groove,
Speaker 1: carpet too soft and color sure to be anything but
Speaker 1: early nineties. That buttery rose mauve shade they stopped using.
Speaker 1: When Fact's machines moved out long hallway, quiet in a
Speaker 1: way that didn't feel empty, but muffled. I heard nothing
Speaker 1: at first, not even the machinery from below. It didn't
Speaker 1: look like any other level. The wits were subtly off,
Speaker 1: and I tasted the tingle of ozone, like protocopies left
Speaker 1: running too long. Sometimes the building has a wrong hallway occorrid,
Speaker 1: or you can't picture in your mental map, no matter
Speaker 1: how many times ye wiel your mop do and the rest.
Speaker 1: No name plates, offices, but not glass, not like the
Speaker 1: open plant re innovations on floors three and five. I
Speaker 1: ran my hand over the velvet ropes corralling the elevator
Speaker 1: bay ropes, and glanced down the length of all far
Speaker 1: off a wall of frosted glass. Somewhere a lamp cast
Speaker 1: soft circles of light onto gold trim doors. I stepped out,
Speaker 1: the carpet bent forgivingly under my shoes. It was neither
Speaker 1: cold nor warm, something in between, like a hotel at
Speaker 1: three in the morning, or quiet funeral parlor just before
Speaker 1: the first relatives arrive. No echo, no whiff of dust.
Speaker 1: My heart wasn't pounding, but my scalp tingled with the
Speaker 1: precise exhilarating disbelief you get when the world blunders ever
Speaker 1: so slightly out of rhythm. I should have been unsettled, maybe,
Speaker 1: but in a city where every night holds a thousand
Speaker 1: secrets of crumb and firewool and an offer as midnight snack,
Speaker 1: janetor singing snatches of psalms in a dozen languages. I
Speaker 1: felt only the hunger of a fresh question. I'd stepped
Speaker 1: out onto a foe that, by all accounts and by
Speaker 1: my own lawn memory, simply wasn't there. From eight floors up,
Speaker 1: the world look faintly smaller through the faded window glass,
Speaker 1: another city, just slightly off weighted, beyond the brass and
Speaker 1: marble skin i'd known. I wanted to see how deep
Speaker 1: them as match went. Most nights, people don't see janitors
Speaker 1: as real parts of the buildings we move through. That's
Speaker 1: the freedom of it invisibility, and the kind of senses
Speaker 1: taker's license to know what's real, what's broken at which
Speaker 1: co workers leave them out behind. Every Friday, on bright afternoons,
Speaker 1: the Bellbank is all old world marble, golden gumrapper stuck
Speaker 1: in scenes, and the faint perfume of insurance and legal ease.
Speaker 1: But at night, I know every vent and closet, every
Speaker 1: echo in the stairwell. Nothing surprises me, not even the
Speaker 1: weird things people do when they think no one's watching Tonight.
Speaker 1: As I eased back into routine past the marble directory,
Speaker 1: I glanced sideways at the commemito plaque Belbank Building, nineteen
Speaker 1: twenty three, seven stories of Progress. The sign itself was
Speaker 1: as familiar as my own badge. I sometimes start my
Speaker 1: rounds here just to soak up the sweetest of surety weld, shrunked,
Speaker 1: jecklist and whistle, the kind of certainty you forget to
Speaker 1: crave until it's missing. Ramona the Knight's scurity, told me
Speaker 1: once nothing's even you here. You just have to look
Speaker 1: busy with they'll think up another inspection. She liked her
Speaker 1: ran slow into stories, slower, half warning, half inside joke.
Speaker 1: Any major change in the Bellbank's world, the new carpet,
Speaker 1: a door moved two feet became the gossip of the decade.
Speaker 1: Mister Hayashi, by contrasts, never forgot a detail. He was
Speaker 1: nearly as old as a building, and roosted in his
Speaker 1: six four architectural office with blueprints like religious scrolls, pausing
Speaker 1: through the midnight to quiz me on the latest small change.
Speaker 1: They painted that trim bright, That wasn't real oak. He
Speaker 1: claimed this building had more design errors than the city's code.
Speaker 1: I sometimes wondered if he'd invented them just to have
Speaker 1: someone to correct. Among the cleaners we'd made a game
Speaker 1: of swapping ghost stories while swapping out trash bags or
Speaker 1: a filling soap. Peter, my chift partner on even weeks
Speaker 1: swore Room five hundred twelve had a file drawer that
Speaker 1: closed itself and at once she left disinfected in a
Speaker 1: lock kitchen, only to find it gun the next morning.
Speaker 1: Thantyo of lasts about haunted filing cabinet, phantom tenants, on
Speaker 1: hiring paperwork left and sign coffee mugs tel aported between floors.
Speaker 1: In a place as old as Bellbank, it's ritual to
Speaker 1: tell two stories on every break, one about a misplaced
Speaker 1: object and one about a ghost that moved it. But
Speaker 1: routine was the bed rock. I kept the tight checklist,
Speaker 1: gus trash, bathrooms, carpets. I locked every oddspill, every bolb out,
Speaker 1: every impossible to explain puddle, usually just acy condensation. Anyway,
Speaker 1: if I caught a new mystery, I wrote it up
Speaker 1: from my own records, marking each shift to desk and
Speaker 1: sticky door rbin explorer in rubber gloves. I love finding
Speaker 1: the edges, but I didn't expect the world to bend
Speaker 1: to whim. I just like knowing how many quarks could
Speaker 1: be solved with the right tool. Tonight, nothing on the
Speaker 1: checklist prepared me for pressing that eight. Back on the
Speaker 1: first floor, I found Ramona perched on her stool at
Speaker 1: the security bay, flipping through social feeds through the glass.
Speaker 1: The street lights sukers goes shadows, all clear, sweep, she asked, mostly.
Speaker 1: I eyed the cameras, no feed for a non existent
Speaker 1: eighth floor. Hey, you ever seen the elevator hit eight?
Speaker 1: She snorted. We're a seven story kind of place, kiddo.
Speaker 1: If it hips, it skips the numbers entirely goes straight
Speaker 1: to the service bay. A wink. You get to find
Speaker 1: me a penthouse. We could use some for rush gossip.
Speaker 1: And just like that, the old rules returned to the
Speaker 1: building as it should be, every story stacking clean. But
Speaker 1: that golden hallway at those office doors I wanted more
Speaker 1: than stories. The elevator was waiting for me, empty as usual.
Speaker 1: I moved quickly, not wanting to lose that sweet teste
Speaker 1: of possibility. The panel. It was back to normal seven
Speaker 1: high as it went. Nothing extra a trick of light,
Speaker 1: a late night wiring test from maintenance, maybe, But I'd
Speaker 1: felt the carpet. How had that peculiar hush, seen the
Speaker 1: angles s garline through the window, even the air was different.
Speaker 1: What else could it be? Everyone jerked about sleepy mistakes,
Speaker 1: funhouse reflections, the tricks of too much disinfectants, bray late
Speaker 1: at night. Still, something subtle had slit the leash. It
Speaker 1: wasn't fear that made my hands restless, wiping the braast,
Speaker 1: tuking up the log book for an extra jotting. It
Speaker 1: was excitement. I resolved to see if it was just
Speaker 1: a trick, I would go back up at the end
Speaker 1: of my shift, same time. This time I'd bring my
Speaker 1: phone on the ready, just in case. On my official route.
Speaker 1: Belbank is a portrait of how building ages with people.
Speaker 1: There are floors that proudly where their history four twos
Speaker 1: marble Adrian flecked and softly pitted, where every summer cleaning
Speaker 1: crew strips decades of shoe polish, the narrow sixth still
Speaker 1: horn with peeriode prints, heavy wallnut doors coosing out the
Speaker 1: drone of traffic. The elevator banks connect these territories, staging
Speaker 1: little drum as a shift change or during fire drills,
Speaker 1: Jokes about lost keys, grouts about overtime, whispers about which
Speaker 1: from missed its rent. The upper floor was a sacred
Speaker 1: territory to after hour's staff. After midnight. We are soul witnesses,
Speaker 1: entrusted with the particular intimacy of the buildings. Skeleton. Night
Speaker 1: makes us bolder, pulling to our handles just in case,
Speaker 1: peering into drop ceilings for leaks, fiddling with left over
Speaker 1: calculaties and typewrit as someone meant to throw away last century.
Speaker 1: I kept my routines close. Before long, I began to
Speaker 1: look for clues more methodically. I paused at every elevator panel,
Speaker 1: watching for a sign of temporary. I tried pushing older buttons.
Speaker 1: No secret codes, no combinations yielded anything above seven. The
Speaker 1: number eight had been as solid as the others, but
Speaker 1: it was gone. A race without rescue or crease. Night
Speaker 1: after night, the elevator remains stubbornly itself. I ran my route,
Speaker 1: retraced my steps, waited past the hour when the floor
Speaker 1: had first appeared. I scanned the marble log before signag
Speaker 1: every map, every fire escape display was unchanged. The public
Speaker 1: directory listed the odd private law office, the insurance agency,
Speaker 1: the tax account, and none above the seventh floor. I
Speaker 1: even stood mop in hand in front of the building's
Speaker 1: historic plaque, willing it to admit anomaly. Seven stories of progress,
Speaker 1: no update, no little brass disk in the shape of
Speaker 1: an a disappointed but not defeated. These things are easier
Speaker 1: to write off when you don't want to believe. Others
Speaker 1: in my orbit had nothing to offer but laughter or sympathy.
Speaker 1: When I asked Ramona again, her eyes sparkled. Elevator gossip,
Speaker 1: EU janitors are getting cagy. I'll tell you this funny
Speaker 1: stuff happens on graveyard chifs a coffee cup shows up
Speaker 1: where you're sure you never put it, you chalk it
Speaker 1: up to overtime. Plus Old Belbick's cables are from another ear.
Speaker 1: Sometimes she just gets ideas. I saw Gida in some
Speaker 1: of the afternoon crew by the vending machines on the
Speaker 1: loading dock, teasing each other about to go tenants and
Speaker 1: warnings not to suitcases linger. They rolled their eyes when
Speaker 1: I asked, ever find lost mail for an eight floor
Speaker 1: jokes about sweet thirteen and the real horrors of eighth
Speaker 1: grade math, nothing but camaraderie and the pulse of share boredom.
Speaker 1: But mister Hayash he went penser, leaning on his cane
Speaker 1: recalling forgotten elevators in sha high way or rooftop tea.
Speaker 1: Rooms drifted in and out of existence, depending on the
Speaker 1: whim of a landlord and the shape of city code.
Speaker 1: Sometimes buildings borrow floor for luck, he mused, But never here,
Speaker 1: not in Chicago. If any one would have tried, I'd
Speaker 1: have noticed. I checked the custodial logs, no mention of
Speaker 1: high floors, no routes beyond seven. My own checklists were neat,
Speaker 1: as if stuffing down the urge to make up a
Speaker 1: new line for something that refused description. Routine restored calm,
Speaker 1: but routine also makes room for obsession. Every time I
Speaker 1: entered Belbank and each persisted, maybe precisely when I least
Speaker 1: expected it, the eighth floor would slide into existence again.
Speaker 1: Two nights later, I returned to the elevator alone, at
Speaker 1: the same hour. The building breathed them tilly. My keys
Speaker 1: jangle with the measured comfort of metal certainty. The panel
Speaker 1: was as it should be, seven press buttons, each ringed
Speaker 1: induled gilt. I waited, landing, silent, stack up nothing. A
Speaker 1: week later, during a lull before the morning crew arrived,
Speaker 1: I found myself standing on floor seven on the threshold
Speaker 1: beneath an ornate scamps. I felt foolish at first, but
Speaker 1: curiosity always finds a way. I traced the shadows in
Speaker 1: the wall, seeking something as seam dip in the plaster
Speaker 1: while mis place grove that might betray a secret passage. Instead,
Speaker 1: I found only a deeper, hush, muffled sound, thick air
Speaker 1: of something quietly waiting at the far end of the hallway.
Speaker 1: My gaze landed on a closet door, industrial gray handle,
Speaker 1: worn by generations of janitors, and unseen, I am sure
Speaker 1: by a single tenant in forty years. My badge let
Speaker 1: me in, but the closet was as it ever was,
Speaker 1: shelf of forgotten cleansers, bucket in lonely vigil, one box
Speaker 1: of rubber cloths. I left the door slightly open, staring
Speaker 1: at the nothing behind it, half hoping to discover a
Speaker 1: staircase going upward of something wildly out of place. A
Speaker 1: stray sheet of paper peak from under a cabin, folded,
Speaker 1: yellowed at the edges. On impulse, I pulled it free
Speaker 1: an office supply memmo and aiated except for a time
Speaker 1: eight hundred five purious. The highest office number in my
Speaker 1: rounds was seven hundred seventeen, so eight hundred five. Maybe
Speaker 1: in the sprint may be a simple numbering error, but
Speaker 1: it fit the contours of a growing mystery. I slipped
Speaker 1: the minnow in my pocket. Finally, spring cleaning, I had
Speaker 1: set myself the small, satisfying task of scrubbing the corners
Speaker 1: of the old seventh floor. There I found a seam
Speaker 1: in the wall near the stairwell. Not dry wall, but
Speaker 1: a strange rubbery channel that looked as if a whole
Speaker 1: section might once have pivoted open, or perhaps sealed up
Speaker 1: a forgotten door. I tugged carefully, years of warnings about
Speaker 1: not damaging original fixtures echoing in my mind, but no luck.
Speaker 1: I leaned my ear to the seam, half expecting a
Speaker 1: draft of the peculiar hollow ring of empty space, but
Speaker 1: only the normal chill of old insulation. Later I made
Speaker 1: a note to check during the day, but at dawn,
Speaker 1: when the first staff arrived, that section of wall look
Speaker 1: completely imremarkable, straight as an arrow, painted and plaster and disturbed.
Speaker 1: That's when contradictions bloomed, not just in my memory but
Speaker 1: in the world around me. The eighth floor, dismissing half
Speaker 1: remembered level appear as an idea more than once. How
Speaker 1: many times had I ignored a stray office number, a
Speaker 1: rumor about mis based files and uncollected package left at
Speaker 1: the room floor. How often does a legacy building revise
Speaker 1: its own story quietly slipping new layers over the cracks.
Speaker 1: My own wall was small, circumscribed by checklist and the
Speaker 1: limits of my rout. But human curiosity is unconstrained. Once
Speaker 1: the line of normalcy ripples, you can't help but trace it,
Speaker 1: tug on each oost read. So I began a more
Speaker 1: deliberate investigation. First, I dove into the janitor's officer, musty, generouspace,
Speaker 1: cluttered with generations of lopocks schedules and a map of
Speaker 1: the building taped to the desk. I trailed an index
Speaker 1: finger along the meticulously drawn floors, seven broad rectangles, each
Speaker 1: annotated with tenant names, closet locations, water rises, no escape
Speaker 1: patch above seven. Even the emergency aches at plans thumbtacked
Speaker 1: and sun faded, excluded any mention of higher office numbers.
Speaker 1: I studied the cleaning roster over late shifts. No assignments
Speaker 1: about seven hundred seventeen, nor notes about extra supplies going
Speaker 1: further up. For a moment, I wondered if those the
Speaker 1: mere logic to it combined floors changed offices a type
Speaker 1: of error, but eight hundred five was too specific to
Speaker 1: be a simple mistake. Next, I asked Ramona for fun
Speaker 1: ever heard of sweet eight hundred five? She grinned, wide
Speaker 1: eyebrows disappearing behind die bangs. Elevator jokes now too honeyed.
Speaker 1: If a sweet like the paid rent, they would have
Speaker 1: read on the fire escapes years ago. All this dale
Speaker 1: in any old stack. Someone says there's a hidden office,
Speaker 1: but no one collects the mail. Then, ever, the soy
Speaker 1: teller she leaned in there used to be elevator mechanics
Speaker 1: who claimed the phantom stop a. It said, your route
Speaker 1: jumps tracks on windy nights, but nobody really knows, might
Speaker 1: be the caffeine or your mob water. I trowled the
Speaker 1: stairwells that night, fhloslight playing over each landing from lobby
Speaker 1: all the way up. The signage ended with seven doorways
Speaker 1: above that were blanks into block closed off with thick
Speaker 1: fire doors. Twice during later shifts attempted for productions. I'd
Speaker 1: arrive at midnight following the same routine, same elevator, same badge,
Speaker 1: form ready, but no weight, not even flicker were the
Speaker 1: button not to be I documented everything, time of arrival,
Speaker 1: specific cart used shoose one, whether my left or right
Speaker 1: hand hit the call button first. I'd even noted what
Speaker 1: pockets held keys paddens eluded me. I've returned to my
Speaker 1: original method of meticulous but flexible, varied order of floors.
Speaker 1: Touched each wall as I swept the final pass, even
Speaker 1: sang one of the old Polish workadet as Gitta favored half.
Speaker 1: Believing in the power of routine magic on the upper floors,
Speaker 1: I grew greedy for clues. On seven A few fixtures
Speaker 1: of wallzkance the baseboarder looked anomalously old, pre war, at
Speaker 1: least carved differently. I pressed around them, tested loose panels,
Speaker 1: but nothing shifted. Still searching, I paid closer attention to
Speaker 1: the contents of my route, especially near closets and abandoned
Speaker 1: maintenance snooks. Such spots in old office towers often occupy
Speaker 1: phuntom square footage. Once my flashlight picked out a fine
Speaker 1: white seam running at a funny diagonal. Nothing to market
Speaker 1: as newer repaired. Could it have been the ghost of
Speaker 1: a block stair. One night I produced that memo for
Speaker 1: eight hundred five. Nobody on day's staff recognized the office number.
Speaker 1: If you droked about secret projects, denied toe of security,
Speaker 1: owedits gone wild. Most shrugged blank. More worryried about running
Speaker 1: out of printer paper than picking apart another oddity in
Speaker 1: the edifice. The secretary for the law firm laugh, well,
Speaker 1: we have enough trouble finding seven hundred four. That's probably
Speaker 1: all floors after seven. Pure myth, but a subtle effect followed.
Speaker 1: Recollections from long time staff didn't quite fit together. Mister Hayashi,
Speaker 1: button hold by the snack machine told me, did you
Speaker 1: not there were proposals in the old city plan for
Speaker 1: a roofed up garden, perhaps even another layer for the bellbank.
Speaker 1: My father maintained blueprints here back in the sixties. So
Speaker 1: many ideas, so many never finished. I suppose if someone
Speaker 1: tried hard enough, they could dream up an extra floor.
Speaker 1: Now and again, I pressed him about memories of offices
Speaker 1: higher up. He shrugged. Memory is unreliable, specially in architecture.
Speaker 1: Sometimes you remember a window that wasn't there. Sometimes you're
Speaker 1: sure you climbed higher than you ever could else were
Speaker 1: tenant's tales dissolved into jokes or confusion. One property manager insisted,
Speaker 1: we lease what exists, nothing more, nothing less. What was
Speaker 1: striking was the pattern wind press memories felt to contradiction
Speaker 1: or avoidance, as though the building shape changed retroactively, to
Speaker 1: banish lost floors, to erase their trees from lived time.
Speaker 1: Each investigation, each person, each mac closed the door on
Speaker 1: obvius explanations, yet each also grew. The mysteries reached brass
Speaker 1: handles that didn't match, odd scenes, and the report of
Speaker 1: deliveries to offices above seven that never arrived in any
Speaker 1: one's mail books, at least not in hours. There was
Speaker 1: no direct path upward, but there were lines, material traces,
Speaker 1: stray jokes, and persistent deniles. There was the matter of
Speaker 1: these lost offices, rooms that from time to time materialized
Speaker 1: in rumor, paperwork, or half remembered night shifts. I now
Speaker 1: investigation had become ritual, as much about piecing together a
Speaker 1: social map of omission and memory as confronting anything physical,
Speaker 1: And the patterns only deepened as weeks stacked up. I
Speaker 1: turned to more durable evidence, paper trails, supply records, anything
Speaker 1: that might slip past human regal. In the cleaning supply room,
Speaker 1: a mess of old books and correspondents formed a silent arcave.
Speaker 1: I flipped through brittle cleaning schedules, checking off patterns of
Speaker 1: routine pagescolled in a dozen hands, some familiar as there
Speaker 1: is unknown even to mister Hayashi. Supply less confirmed mob orders,
Speaker 1: garbage bags, and on certain months a recurring entry of
Speaker 1: eighth floor windows open or Office eight hundred five were fills.
Speaker 1: Sometimes the order span decades between entries. Dayshift supervisor's noted
Speaker 1: eight hundred five sea attached request, yet attached sheets had
Speaker 1: been long since torn free, the most recent among them
Speaker 1: just two years prior. A familiar handwriting someone I faintly remembered,
Speaker 1: a part timer who left for grad school. This detail
Speaker 1: was both promising and deeply odd. No one had of
Speaker 1: acclaimed duty up stairs, but the documentation was there, as
Speaker 1: solid as any modern email. More supply receipts, cross reference
Speaker 1: for sticky notes, and tourner approvals, march for eighth as
Speaker 1: is such an office Sweet eight hundred five existed openly
Speaker 1: in both the recent and distant past. Long past midnight,
Speaker 1: on a slow night, I made my way again to
Speaker 1: the seventh floor. The odd seam in the wall near
Speaker 1: the utility closet now seemed even nought a weighted by implication,
Speaker 1: I press gently, moving along the coal surface, half believing
Speaker 1: that resolve or intention my shift the building's fabric to night.
Speaker 1: The closet was locked. The next it was opened, but
Speaker 1: the inside was tight modern unperfunctory. Once I returned to
Speaker 1: find that patch of the wall entirely seamless, no clause.
Speaker 1: It had all just smooth, recent pain, as if some
Speaker 1: one had erased the entire space from the universe of
Speaker 1: a night. By the next Tuesday, just after three, working
Speaker 1: my extra hours, I spied the door slightly ajar draw
Speaker 1: of spare bulbs open, two walks, skin of coffee, but
Speaker 1: behind a half drawn bucket. I glimpsed a small wooden
Speaker 1: stair narrows those in attic flats. My heart skipped too
Speaker 1: quick for fear only electric curiosity. I squeezed through, careful
Speaker 1: not to scrape my shirt, and crept up four shallow steps,
Speaker 1: but just above a panel of ply would block further passage.
Speaker 1: With the rough simed reading do not store maintenance only
Speaker 1: above a draft, I unlatched the chapter alike dryer, not
Speaker 1: attic like, and faint wearing. Help kindled another level, but
Speaker 1: the space opened to nothing more than tight piping, gray insulation,
Speaker 1: heat pumps, utility coalspice entirely inadequate, and certainly not large
Speaker 1: enough to house an entire office floor. I squatted, peering
Speaker 1: into the gloom, wishing for any clear dropped letter, a
Speaker 1: business card, a mug with eight hundred fife painted on it. Instead,
Speaker 1: only coils of wire, the stair or room of forgotten
Speaker 1: lunch rappers. A shoe is probably closed by Janetor's past.
Speaker 1: I shrugged and gently closed the door, feeling the same
Speaker 1: soft click of possibility denying itself. Yet the oddness was persistent.
Speaker 1: The closet sometimes there, sometimes not night to night. The
Speaker 1: sense of spatial stability had been surged. Now. If you'd asked,
Speaker 1: I'd have said the eight flour was less location than
Speaker 1: a possibility stretch of routine. At every once in a while,
Speaker 1: the building's intentions nearly completed, like a song stop mid
Speaker 1: phras er story that only emerges in the telling. Fumbling
Speaker 1: for an explanation, I remembered something I'd once heard from Ghita.
Speaker 1: Some spaces exist out of habit if nobody enters a
Speaker 1: room long enough, it forgets what it was supposed to be.
Speaker 1: The eighth floor then was less about sneaking up pidden
Speaker 1: stairs or catching a lost office number. Perhaps it was
Speaker 1: a kind of unfinished business, decrease in the predictability of maintenance,
Speaker 1: repetition and hope. After all, paperwork lives on and routine
Speaker 1: itself as both memory and magic. Still, I want to
Speaker 1: proof something objectively persuasive. So I turned to the last roum,
Speaker 1: not yet thoroughly plundered blueprints, the silent home ropes and
Speaker 1: final truce of every building. Of all the residents of Balbank,
Speaker 1: mister Hayashi was the only one with unfettered access to
Speaker 1: the bells of historical planning. I passed by on a night.
Speaker 1: He was burning midnight isle heat lamp, pouring over a
Speaker 1: sheaf of frayed documents beside coffee strong enough to strip paint.
Speaker 1: Let me see, he said, eyes twinkling as I mused
Speaker 1: about extra doors and half remembered rooms. City has no
Speaker 1: secrets from us, old friend. We leaf through files, blue
Speaker 1: and white sheets, pencil margined, some crisp, some yellowing. At
Speaker 1: the corners, he found the original Belbank plans layered with
Speaker 1: additions and annotations as much Palamsis's record there it was
Speaker 1: a carefully drawn, ambitious eight floor internal offices, conference suites, restrooms,
Speaker 1: even a pantry marked activity k nook proposed not vinal
Speaker 1: clear signatures by architects unknown to me, sprawled alongside crisp
Speaker 1: hopeful lettering in one margin a faint notation proposed but
Speaker 1: never constructed, await city approval, pending occupancy. Later pencil marks
Speaker 1: darker in several unfamiliar hands, red line do not build
Speaker 1: yet some one had gone to the work of ensling
Speaker 1: and would be tenants names, a lining office numbers with
Speaker 1: desks and phones that had never existed. More striking maintenance
Speaker 1: records kept over the following decades included of hand entries
Speaker 1: light maintenance eighth or replaced bulbs eight hundred five are
Speaker 1: window cleaning eighth entered sporadically in entirely different handwriting stas bowl,
Speaker 1: neatlyopant blockie, no attempt at continuity, as if the every
Speaker 1: ten or fifteen years someone remembered and sled the ghost
Speaker 1: floor into official routine just to keep the paperwork from collapsing.
Speaker 1: Flipped to later pages references to city ordinances that apparently
Speaker 1: halted construction letters to city works denying the possibility of
Speaker 1: occupancy of a fire rating. Yet right below a clip
Speaker 1: telegrant to an enlisted number reading supplies delivered eighth for
Speaker 1: waiting keys, they struck meat at the eight Flour was
Speaker 1: a habit and paperwork as much as an architecture echo
Speaker 1: of everyone's intentions, layered atop one another. The human urge
Speaker 1: to build, plan, and record in't care whether reality allowed
Speaker 1: the ship to persist outside of blueprints and forms. By
Speaker 1: now every attempt at explanation with numbered offices, mistaken memories,
Speaker 1: clever office pranks had failed. Here there was the eighth
Speaker 1: floor written and written as blueprint, as memo, as supply list,
Speaker 1: as recollection, and finally, as something I had walked through,
Speaker 1: remembered and now pursued in records. The realization gathered itself.
Speaker 1: The eighth floor recurred in this building, not through hidden
Speaker 1: stairs or real dimensions, but as an architectural possibility left
Speaker 1: him finished slipping through the cracks in routine memory, and
Speaker 1: the unquenchable hope inscribed in every maintenance update not simply
Speaker 1: a trick of perception, nor a lingering flee carried by rumor,
Speaker 1: but a persistent, half finished reality, sometimes strong enough to
Speaker 1: a pier, always present in the architecture of intention. I
Speaker 1: Saffer a long minute had bent over the blueprints, listening
Speaker 1: to the quiet mechanical heart of belbentick away past midnight.
Speaker 1: Perhaps in the right confluence of routine, memory and desire,
Speaker 1: a floor could almost exist. I wanted to know if
Speaker 1: it could do more, if possibility alone was enough to
Speaker 1: give a place way to Sam and the dust of
Speaker 1: all coffee mugs. Mister Hyash's office humb with slow, night
Speaker 1: warmed energy, the air between us thick with the unmistakable
Speaker 1: promise of unfinished work. He left the blueprint spread like
Speaker 1: a gambler's hand, my fingerprints already dusted on to the
Speaker 1: margins from tracing each possible stair. Outside the window, the
Speaker 1: city glimmered with its midnight patients. Another hour, another shuffle
Speaker 1: of tax cabs and neon flicker. But here time pulled.
Speaker 1: Neither of us wanted to close the sheets. In that
Speaker 1: pool of quiet, mister Hyashi ran a bony finger along
Speaker 1: the penciled up line of the proposed eight floor lips
Speaker 1: pursed head cocked as if listening for something three decades
Speaker 1: late for its own meeting. When architect's dream, we always
Speaker 1: leave room for her or for hope, he murmured, as
Speaker 1: if I'd asked a question, I'd interest myself to speak
Speaker 1: without sounding either too wild or too small. So I shrugged.
Speaker 1: Some fragmentary thought was trying to fit itself together in
Speaker 1: my minded that so many hands had written this space
Speaker 1: into half existence, that with each memo, each cleaning lock,
Speaker 1: the eighth floor seemed a little more plausible, as if
Speaker 1: wishing in paperwork together might cook her room to be real.
Speaker 1: Mister Hyashi yawned, then, gathering his coffee, fading back into
Speaker 1: his own world of bands and dusty proof. If you
Speaker 1: find that eight floor again, snap a photo for me,
Speaker 1: he grinned, and tell her hello from the sixth I chuckled.
Speaker 1: Let myself out. Blue printag is pressing a faint memory
Speaker 1: into my palm. But as the off store closed, my
Speaker 1: thoughts no longer cared about chasing a ghost with the camera.
Speaker 1: The question had bloomed past obsession with tricks or head
Speaker 1: and crawl spaces. Clearly there was more to this floor,
Speaker 1: something recursive, something in the DNA of the city's desire,
Speaker 1: to become more than it was. The next night, as
Speaker 1: I went through my route, I thought about intention, ha, routine, paperwork,
Speaker 1: and longing stack up in the world. What made anything persist?
Speaker 1: Wasn't everything fragile, susceptible to being changed by enough repetition
Speaker 1: or neglect. Valbank had always felt changeless, but now every
Speaker 1: door handle and loose tal hummed with the specter of
Speaker 1: designs nearly realized. On break, I pocked myself in the
Speaker 1: cramped waldof crook of the janitor's lounge. With the blueprints
Speaker 1: still fresh in my mind, I opened my phone and
Speaker 1: start a cross referencing the supply members i'd taken pictures of,
Speaker 1: matching them to building work orders archived on the company network.
Speaker 1: I kept circling back to that number as weet eight
Speaker 1: hundred five. It appeared too often in too many hands
Speaker 1: to be an error, so I tried a new angle.
Speaker 1: Names the log books and supply slips off and included
Speaker 1: the sun names of who had supposedly ordered or approved
Speaker 1: work for the eight names like kersh Doralde, Harmon. None
Speaker 1: were familiar, not from my day to day by the
Speaker 1: grumbling tenants. On six and seven, digging through Old City listings.
Speaker 1: I found nothing. No office Sweet eight hundred five, no
Speaker 1: doralc churched tied to Belbank, since the building was laid
Speaker 1: stone by stone. Archoves for neighboring buildings listed hundreds of
Speaker 1: contractors and hemp workers. But those sour names slept through
Speaker 1: every database like water. I checked for mail routes, tenant listings,
Speaker 1: even credit checks. Nothing. Curiosity burned, so emboldened, I called
Speaker 1: up a city record keeper I knew from cleaning her
Speaker 1: office twice a month, Marshal Queen of the Public Records rooms,
Speaker 1: using in an economic ches surrounded by high school interns
Speaker 1: and broken stapers. She picked up on the second ring
Speaker 1: Sweet eight hundred five. She said, after a pause, you
Speaker 1: mean in Belbank, no such lease honorable seven floors in
Speaker 1: a roof permit. Last checked what twenty sixteen I can dick,
Speaker 1: but off the book snow, unless it's for some storage
Speaker 1: closet on seven. Sometimes landlords foote the numbers for tax.
Speaker 1: She promised to call if anything pained, but her voice
Speaker 1: told me she didn't expect a miracle. When Ammona wandered
Speaker 1: by on her rounds, I thrust a copy of the
Speaker 1: memo under her nose. Bellbank eight hundred five signaturey Harmon
Speaker 1: supplies to be delivered before Friday two thousand four. She snickered,
Speaker 1: that's a new one. You've got a time machine in
Speaker 1: your cut, calls Harmon. That guy's been gone from the
Speaker 1: peril since before I hired on night handwriting. Though maybe
Speaker 1: he goes straight for the elevator. I asked if she'd
Speaker 1: ever handle deliveries marked for the upper floors. She scraunched
Speaker 1: her face, recalling once or twice Old Eddie, the mail guy,
Speaker 1: would leave a box in the elevator for the lawyers
Speaker 1: up top. For every time it would disappear before I
Speaker 1: made my rounds. He'd come back the next week, complaining
Speaker 1: no one signed for it. She shrugged, But Eddie also
Speaker 1: used to claim that the elevator talked back when the
Speaker 1: building was too empty. The laughter was friendly, but it
Speaker 1: left me feeling alone with his curiosity. Every One had
Speaker 1: a version, but no one ever saw just how or
Speaker 1: remembered after the fact. It struck me. The eighth floor's
Speaker 1: existence flickered between the lines, in the negative space of intention,
Speaker 1: rumor and unfinished business. Every real effort to tie to
Speaker 1: a person or a date dissolved. Maybe the names were placeholders,
Speaker 1: the deliveries were rituals, staining in absence that the building
Speaker 1: needed as much as any office space. The city's architecture
Speaker 1: was full of ghosts, but this one operated by consensus,
Speaker 1: by acts of belief for bureaucracy. I decided to go further,
Speaker 1: testing not the existence, but the function of the eight
Speaker 1: four's possibility. Late Thursday, I bundled the assorted memos, blueprints,
Speaker 1: and notes for my own lock. There was one last
Speaker 1: avenue physical objects routed to the eight four. In error,
Speaker 1: pulling from the cleaning supplies, I borrowed a small box, unlabeled,
Speaker 1: carefully taped, and addressed it to Sweet eight hundred five.
Speaker 1: I left it in the elevator, set the penelty seven,
Speaker 1: and waited, clipboard in hand to see if the universe
Speaker 1: would bite. The first were on nothing. The elevator rose,
Speaker 1: listed all the familiar stops, deposited me on seven. With
Speaker 1: the box still sitting on the floor. I ran a
Speaker 1: full sweep, then took the stairs back down pulse high.
Speaker 1: Second try near two wayam added an old office mug
Speaker 1: to the box, one of the lost and never found lot,
Speaker 1: chipped and forgotten but brended with the disco ere insurance logo.
Speaker 1: Again pressed seven again nothing. But on the third attempt,
Speaker 1: after cleaning the whole near the maintenance caused it and
Speaker 1: to read the old blue print fold on my phone,
Speaker 1: and I pressed the button, and yessay, it appeared once more.
Speaker 1: There it was as both invitation and dare, the soft
Speaker 1: yellow lamp pul steady, waiting for validation. I nodded to myself,
Speaker 1: heart neither racing nor calm, but throwning with intellectual delight.
Speaker 1: The box quivered minutely. As the elevators started to rise.
Speaker 1: The ride felt as it had the first night, normal,
Speaker 1: except for the extra silent layer of his spectation chime.
Speaker 1: The door slid open onto the eighth floor, the same
Speaker 1: velvet rupush. I stepped out, box in hand. The hallway
Speaker 1: was still the city through the window, just the shade
Speaker 1: off from the four buildings, crowding where none should stand,
Speaker 1: a familiar billboard missing. I walked the corridor, pausing outside
Speaker 1: the first office, marked by a solid brass number eight
Speaker 1: hundred five, where no tenants name was sighted, only a
Speaker 1: dusty card slot empty. At my feet, powdery carpet marbled
Speaker 1: faintly with time and lack of footsteps. I set the
Speaker 1: box down on the threshold, hesitated, and forced myself to knock.
Speaker 1: The sound was swallowed by the whole softness, unnatural in
Speaker 1: its lack of echo. I waited, feeling suddenly like a
Speaker 1: supplicant and an alter to probability. Nothing moved, and no
Speaker 1: shadows of the frosted door, no voices, no hum beyond
Speaker 1: the static weir of hidden machines. I left the box,
Speaker 1: half expecting, half hoping someone or something would claim it.
Speaker 1: When I glanced back in the elevator, they ate had
Speaker 1: vanished from its panel. Back in the physical world, the
Speaker 1: seven floors stacked as they always had. But wad if
Speaker 1: I wondered? Every act like this, A delivery, a memo
Speaker 1: and knock kept in, opening a live in reality for
Speaker 1: the unfinished to persist or at least recur. It was
Speaker 1: no longer merely about proof. It was about process or
Speaker 1: ritual by which the possible is maintained, and the city
Speaker 1: through us rehearses, futures and memories as real as any door. Still,
Speaker 1: I hungered for human roots, names that could ancer or
Speaker 1: at least illuminate, the feeling of granduran an administrative oversight,
Speaker 1: so I decided to chase the names more seriously. Using
Speaker 1: employee databases, old city records, and obituary listings. I ran
Speaker 1: each distinct surname from the supply memos and contract sheets,
Speaker 1: the oral GERSH. E. Harman. Nothing. These names were nowhere,
Speaker 1: noble eCos, no tenant notices, not even a blip in
Speaker 1: the belving's own lawn human paper trail. It was as
Speaker 1: if these identities had only ever existed between the walls,
Speaker 1: summoned by the act of possibility, or maybe invented by
Speaker 1: nailis staffer. Playing a long running prank, I tried a
Speaker 1: new tack. I reached out to form a postal work aloo,
Speaker 1: A craggy face man I remembered from years ago, now
Speaker 1: route who still stopped into Belbank for the coin operated coffee.
Speaker 1: Lou laughed when I asked about mysterious packages. Funny thing,
Speaker 1: he said, voice rolling like a secret hand shake. Back
Speaker 1: in the eighties, there were months when I'd stack a
Speaker 1: couple boxes at the elevator address, called it for not
Speaker 1: my writing, and always on nights when the desk guard
Speaker 1: was on break. Next day those boxes were gone, I'd
Speaker 1: ask the regulars, but nobody ever signed. They just disappear.
Speaker 1: After a while, I figured, if someone was hustling but
Speaker 1: never made sense, why create work for yourself. If it
Speaker 1: was theft, it was real patient. He looked at me,
Speaker 1: searching for whether I really wanted the truth. Some buildings,
Speaker 1: well they always feel a little out of sink belbings
Speaker 1: like that, a layer missing, or maybe just hidden in
Speaker 1: plain sight. I thanked him and left head spinning. The
Speaker 1: delivery is lent materiality to the possibility. Maybe the Eighth
Speaker 1: Flora was less about physical bricks and more about the
Speaker 1: city's need to build, to persistently intend, to whole room
Speaker 1: for what could still be. But if I was right,
Speaker 1: the effect wasn't confined to Belbank, or even just to
Speaker 1: the night shifts in their stories. The building embraced the
Speaker 1: logic of potential. Each memo, delivery, or conversation about what
Speaker 1: I invited, not mere air, but intentionality, space as and
Speaker 1: enclosed parentheses. It became a game I played with myself,
Speaker 1: posing in the elevator, Wayne Keys and Clipbert's, seeing which
Speaker 1: combinations drew out the phantom mad. Some nights it was
Speaker 1: just the ordinary. Seven other nights, after having read Arkvelis
Speaker 1: or handled a lost letter eight winked on bright as
Speaker 1: a second chance Patten's tease at the corner of my mind?
Speaker 1: Why did the it force sometimes appear in all its
Speaker 1: hazy completeness and other times elude every attempt to pin
Speaker 1: it down? Was it intention, a trick of attention, a
Speaker 1: ritual process repeating from one work or to another, or
Speaker 1: something external rooted in the city's rhythms. In the lives
Speaker 1: Slooping through checkerboard routines, I turned methodically to data. I
Speaker 1: started tracking with dull, obsessive precision, time of day, sleep, schedule,
Speaker 1: what I was carrying, whether outside, cleaning roats, notes on
Speaker 1: which shift fed, swapped with a cross hatched columns, hoping
Speaker 1: for a pattern. After a month, a contra emerged, not
Speaker 1: cause and effect exactly, but correlation. The eighth four was
Speaker 1: more likely to present itself after midnight, most often between
Speaker 1: one fifteen and three ten a m. One nights when
Speaker 1: old paperwork was handled or rituals would preserved. The coffee
Speaker 1: mug returned a memophiled if I lingered in certain corridors,
Speaker 1: especially after talking to another staffer about Belbank's history. Bond
Speaker 1: evenings following a sudden powerf liquor, or a brun out
Speaker 1: in the city grid. Almost never when the building was crowded,
Speaker 1: and never after receiving fresh paint or major renovation. Each
Speaker 1: appearance subtly warped familiarity. After exiting on the eighth and
Speaker 1: returning id fined on the seventh that certain doors had changed,
Speaker 1: a break room would have moved, or the city outside
Speaker 1: seemed to have blinked along a slightly different gride. It
Speaker 1: could have been tiredness, it could have been more. I
Speaker 1: began to think of the eight four as less a
Speaker 1: place in morn, intermittent, the excess phase within the logic
Speaker 1: of balbancan alternate completion. As architects and tenants for a
Speaker 1: century had written, intended, and believed it into not quite
Speaker 1: being a quantum office suite, and tangled with the city's
Speaker 1: desire never to be done. No single tests provided a proof,
Speaker 1: not in scientific sense, but each announced his deep in
Speaker 1: the question. This was not just architectural air, no memory defect,
Speaker 1: no ghost. It was a building living with a possibility.
Speaker 1: My curiosity grew common and focused, not frantic, but invested.
Speaker 1: I saw the city differently on my commute. I caught
Speaker 1: myself scanning every old office tower, watching for corks, a
Speaker 1: four unlit plaque with the wrong number, a meal slot
Speaker 1: with no corresponding space. But Balbank was where I could act.
Speaker 1: I spent a weekend prowling the city's permit archives, pulling
Speaker 1: files older than almost every tenant. In the records of
Speaker 1: the Architectural Society, I found the original application for Balbank's
Speaker 1: eight four from nineteen twenty two, a model workplace for
Speaker 1: the city's new professionals, a floor between the pragmatic and
Speaker 1: the ideal. Letters attached from rebeutenants, lawyers, insurance men, civic engineers.
Speaker 1: One letter dated only able recounted air anticipation of a
Speaker 1: view from above, the hope for another prospect for the
Speaker 1: city's future. Then, in nineteen twenty three, a tourist update
Speaker 1: to propose Flora left pending after council from city's earning
Speaker 1: agency proceed no further but maintain readiness for adjustment. Over
Speaker 1: the next years, the plan appeared and evaporated in records,
Speaker 1: always surviving at the boundary of realization. It continued notes
Speaker 1: for appending deliveries, memos about elevator access for a potential
Speaker 1: future occupancy, and the sturdy flutter of bureaucratic preparation. The
Speaker 1: trail passed a wably too, through the switch boordier and
Speaker 1: into the modern age of mailons and logistics software. Nowhere
Speaker 1: did anyone ever sign off complete. Among the thick stack,
Speaker 1: a pale memo from nineteen fifty one, written in leaping script,
Speaker 1: all staff meeting on eight noon shop bring current reports.
Speaker 1: The handwriting, I realized with the jowel take it the
Speaker 1: loose darving script, I used myself a left handed s lant,
Speaker 1: a peculiar cross bond the tee. I shook my head,
Speaker 1: either coincidence or something stranger, but enough to tiden the
Speaker 1: news of curiosity around intention. What if in pursuing the
Speaker 1: eighth Floor I was rehearsing a ritual already ridden by
Speaker 1: decades of hands before mine, repeating the city's endless argument
Speaker 1: with finitude. When you spend enough time within the walls
Speaker 1: of a persistent question, the difference between haunting and ambition
Speaker 1: gets blurry. But then I stopped needing anyone to validate
Speaker 1: what I'd experienced. There was no need proof, no ghosts,
Speaker 1: no monster, not even a bang pipe to blame. What
Speaker 1: remained was this, The eighth floor was Bowbot's way of
Speaker 1: holding open a space for becoming the live experience of intentions, persistence,
Speaker 1: long path practicality. One night, Ramona drew up beside me
Speaker 1: at the monitors after her rounds, her voice gentle as
Speaker 1: she threw her feet up on the reel. You still
Speaker 1: hunting for that eight floor or ha, I nodded, laughter
Speaker 1: in my eyes, I think it's less about hunting and
Speaker 1: more about not letting the question close. She turned the
Speaker 1: idea over. Some buildings are like people. Sometimes parts of
Speaker 1: them don't show up until you are looking for the holes.
Speaker 1: Across the night that landed hard but kindly, there was
Speaker 1: a grace to partial realities, trusting in the beauty of
Speaker 1: an umbil ro room and a mailed memo a floor
Speaker 1: queue to appear in the cadence of our hope. Not
Speaker 1: every office gets rented, some doors don't open yet, And
Speaker 1: in accepting that, I became less concer earned with catalog
Speaker 1: in the anomaly, and more invested in how all of
Speaker 1: us shaped the buildings we live and work inside, through routine,
Speaker 1: in story, labor and longing, through every act of naming
Speaker 1: or remembering, or simply showing up for the next possibility
Speaker 1: somewhere near dawn after another routines weep, no phantom floors,
Speaker 1: no vanished supply boxes, just the honest weight of my keys,
Speaker 1: and Mopye glanced at the old plaque in a marble lobby,
Speaker 1: seven stories of progress. I smiled, felt content, and wondered
Speaker 1: softly for whom or what the extra story waited. The
Speaker 1: weeks passed, a slow cycling of routines, spring shifted to
Speaker 1: the maggissar of early summer. When I finally grasped the
Speaker 1: living lesson to what bebec itself seemed to insist on,
Speaker 1: I found comfort, not uncertainty, but an attention. Our buildings,
Speaker 1: like our lives, are a palimpsyst Possibility seems to each layer.
Speaker 1: Sometimes it becomes stone, other times only waits gently for
Speaker 1: someone curious enough to try the right combination of action
Speaker 1: and notice. Every law book, every repeated errand halls opened
Speaker 1: that space. I took to pausing in the elevator late
Speaker 1: at night, sometimes pressing a clean slip of paper addressed
Speaker 1: with impossible suitets against the mirror just case. Half the
Speaker 1: time it came back to me in the morning with
Speaker 1: no sign of disturbance, But occasionally there was a soft
Speaker 1: impression where none had been before, as if intention alone
Speaker 1: could whisper through brass and marble. One quiet shift, Ramona
Speaker 1: found me at the end of her rounds. He ever,
Speaker 1: wish you could just finish something and be done, she asked,
Speaker 1: looking up at the flickering street light. I shook my
Speaker 1: head and grinned. Maybe the real living happens in the
Speaker 1: unfinished corners. Bubbings taught me that much. She whistled softly,
Speaker 1: then squeezed my arm warmth passing between us. When you
Speaker 1: know the intimate routes and all the hidden seams, acceptance
Speaker 1: comes easier. Nothing is ever truly finished. Every room is
Speaker 1: waiting on some future act. On my last shift before vacation,
Speaker 1: I found myself with the old memmo from nineteen fifty
Speaker 1: one is Invaded the cull of the wy on the
Speaker 1: closing signature on cannif from distance or time. Standing in
Speaker 1: the elevator, I traced the outline again, chuckling at how
Speaker 1: much it resembled my own hurried notes, the panel glow
Speaker 1: of grainy reflection shimmering back at me. As I held
Speaker 1: the memo, considering all the hands it must have passed through. Ancient, ordinary,
Speaker 1: imagined to the elevator, But this time the light didn't stop.
Speaker 1: Et cettin It glimmered for a beat, then blinked over
Speaker 1: to display. One new word returned, not a number, not
Speaker 1: a direction, but a suggestion. I stepped out into the
Speaker 1: marble lobby, the building empty, the air soft and waiting.
Speaker 1: The world outside continued and stoppably, cows passing city lights,
Speaker 1: glancing off wet pavement. Somebody is last adrifting by from
Speaker 1: a distant cafe. I tapped the memo into my pocket
Speaker 1: and turned to look back at the elevator, feeling the
Speaker 1: cloud of balban settle around me, not as an answer,
Speaker 1: but an invitation. Maybe every act of design, every floor
Speaker 1: we dream of, every unbuilt room, alives on in the
Speaker 1: places we moved through, ready to flicker into being for
Speaker 1: anyone willing to look beyond the expected. As I pushed
Speaker 1: open the door and stepped into night, I thought, where else,
Speaker 1: in all these city blocks and daily rounds might possibility
Speaker 1: be waiting, quietly intersecting with our routines, asking for nothing
Speaker 1: more than curiosity and a willingness to let um finish
Speaker 1: business remain a little bit open, And that is the end.
Speaker 1: Thank you for listening, and I will see you in
Speaker 1: the next one.